“Let’s follow her and see where she goes, shall we?” Dr. Kroopnik suggested. “Full speed ahead, Captain Frank!”
“You got it, Dr. K,” I said as the river swept us downstream. “Although I think full speed is our only option.”
“Fine by me,” he replied. “I’ve got a bone to pick with my evil twin.”
“You really don’t have any idea who she is?” I asked.
“I’d been hoping you could tell me,” he said. “I’d never seen her before until yesterday, when I caught her snooping around my research station. Said she got lost hiking and asked to use my radio, so I invited her in and told her to make herself at home while I went back down to bring up some gear. When I got back, I saw she’d accidentally dropped an old flyer on the floor. I bent down to pick it up and saw Aleksei’s picture staring back at me. He was lot younger and didn’t have that crazy beard yet, but those wild eyes of his were a dead giveaway. So was the hundred-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to his capture.”
“So what did you do?” I asked with my ears tuned to Dr. K’s story and my eyes set on Not Dr. K’s horse up ahead.
“Best I could figure, she was some kind of bounty hunter out to get my old friend. So I turned tail and ran to warn Aleksei. But it turns out my evil twin isn’t just younger and prettier than me, she’s a lot faster. She clobbered me with my own microscope before I made it to the door.”
“No wonder she was so eager to get rid of us,” I said. “She must have been pretending to be you so we wouldn’t find out the truth and alert the authorities.”
“Seems that way,” he observed. “At least I know she didn’t get Aleksei.”
“So you really are friends with that guy?” I asked, unable to shake the image of the mad cannibal from my mind. I wanted to trust Dr. Kroopnik, but we’d already been burned by one Kroopnik and I wasn’t about to take any chances on another.
“He’s a big, burly teddy bear, really. If he was going to eat anyone, it would have been me!” He laughed. “I accidentally stumbled right through his front door about ten years ago, shortly after I’d started my research on Black Bear Mountain. You see, I’d come across the most unlikely little garden full of Brunnera macrophylla growing in the middle of the woods. . . .”
“The Siberian bugloss!” I exclaimed, picturing the little blue flowers I’d seen growing in the meadow.
“You saw it too! You can imagine my excitement! Well, I followed those plants right to Aleksei’s cave and disrupted his afternoon nap. Talk about finding a nonnative species! Turns out he brought seeds from his birthplace in Russia’s Ural Mountains on the plane with him to make his new mountain hideout feel more like home.”
“And what, he just invited you in for borscht and Russian caviar?” I asked.
“Blackberry bramble tea and smoked trout, actually,” he replied. “The truth is, living all by yourself on top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere can get a little lonely, and, well, we’ve been good friends ever since!”
Dr. Kroopnik yelled the last part. The rapids had started to pick up speed, and from the looks of the frothing maelstrom ahead, we were about to hit the biggest water we’d seen yet. The good news was, we were closing in on the phony Miss Max.
She must have sensed us behind her, because she looked over her shoulder for the first time. I couldn’t read her expression, but I knew she’d seen us from the way she kicked her horse into a full gallop. The ravine wall rose steeply to her left, trapping her along the bank, so she could run, but she couldn’t hide. I just had to make sure to keep left where the river branched just ahead.
“Hold on tight!” I shouted, using all my strength to steer the raft to the left so we wouldn’t lose her. “Things are about to get choppy!”
Dr. K yelled something back. I couldn’t quite make it out over the churning rapids, but it sounded like he just kept repeating the word “tight” a lot. I was doing a pretty impressive job of steering, so I couldn’t figure out what had him suddenly looking so panicked.
I’d just managed to guide the raft left past the fork when I realized Dr. Kroopnik hadn’t been yelling “tight” at all—he’d been yelling “right.” As in, he wanted me to “go right!”
Because I’d just steered us to the top of a waterfall!
17
MAYDAY! MAYDAY!
JOE
WHEN I LOOKED BACK DOWN at the river to signal to Frank, his raft was already hurtling uncontrollably down the rapids, dragging some guy behind it like a fish on a hook.
“Hurry! We must save Max!” The not-dead Russian mobster lifted me onto my feet and began running back along the bridge toward the research station.
“Max?” I said in astonishment. “Forget about Max. That’s my brother down there. We have to go after him!”
“Yes, exactly, we go save Max and your brother,” he agreed nonsensically.
I was pretty sure Aleksei didn’t want to eat me, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t still crazy, because I couldn’t figure out what in the world he was talking about.
“Max Kroopnik just tried to throw me off a bridge!” I reminded him. “She’s not the one who needs saving.”
“What are you talking about? Max didn’t try to kill you. Strange jewel thief lady tried to kill you. And why did you call him her?” Aleksei turned back to me with a puzzled expression. “I think you hit your head when you fell. It is okay, there is a medicine kit in the helicopter. Now come on before their boat goes too far down the river!”
He took off running like a . . . well, like a madman. Aleksei sure seemed to think the guy getting dragged down the river was Max, which meant one of two things: either there were two Max Kroopniks—or our Max was an imposter. The details were going to have to wait, though.
“Back up a second,” I called, running after him. “Did you say helicopter?”
“Quickest way downriver, I’ll show you,” he answered without breaking stride.
On the other side of the hill sat a small two-seat helicopter. Aleksei squeezed his large frame through the door and beckoned for me to join him.
“It is the chopper Max uses to fly in supplies to the mountain,” Aleksei explained, punching a series of buttons as the copter whirred to life.
“Are you sure you know how to fly this thing?” I asked, reluctantly climbing into the passenger seat.
“Don’t worry, I fly helicopters and planes all the time when I was a young man,” he replied confidently as he examined the controls. “Now, where is the button that makes it go up?”
I groaned. “Yeah, but wasn’t that, like, thirty years ago?”
I was starting to have serious reservations about boarding an aircraft with a crazy-looking Russian mountain man who hadn’t flown anything in three decades and crashed the last plane he had flown!
“Flying is like riding bike. You don’t forget,” he assured me. “Besides, I never crash anything I don’t mean to.”
Somehow, that didn’t make me feel any better, not that I had time for second thoughts about our mode of transportation. We were airborne! Sort of . . .
The small chopper hovered unsteadily, dipping and diving as Aleksei tried to figure out the controls. And I’d thought flying with Commander Gonzo was scary!
The chopper’s two-way radio took my mind off our possible impending doom. I tried tuning it to the emergency channel, but there was too much static to tell if anyone was on the other end.
“MAYDAY! MAYDAY!” I shouted into the radio. “There’s a man overboard in the rapids below the old ranger lookout station on Black Bear Mountain, and four campers are stranded nearby, one of them injured. Please send help.”
I repeated the message two more times before hanging up, hoping my pleas for help had reached someone—and hoping they wouldn’t have to rescue the two guys in the helicopter as well. Aleksei was still trying to get control over the copter, which was bobbing and weaving like a punch-drunk bumblebee as he tried to keep it over the river so we could look for Frank’
s raft.
“So you must be the young science students Max was so excited to meet,” he said after hearing my Mayday call. “I am sorry. It is my fault the jewel thief lady ruined the trip for everybody and put you in danger.”
It sounded like Aleksei’s Max was the real Max after all. I also had a hunch that Dr. Kroopnik wasn’t the only one she’d impersonated. Frank and I hadn’t been able to see the rider’s features from across the clearing beneath the crazy mountain man getup, but . . .
“That wasn’t you who tried to run us down while we were lighting the signal fire, was it?”
“Why would I want to run you down? I just met you,” came Aleksei’s perplexed reply.
“So you don’t know who that woman is either?” I asked.
“No, this party-pooper lady is a mystery to me. Nobody in the world knows I am here except Max Kroopnik.” He paused to growl in my direction. “And now you.”
I gulped. I couldn’t tell whether he meant it as an observation or a threat. “I’d never heard of Aleksei Orlov or the Mad Hermit until yesterday! My brother and I are just good at solving mysteries, and I was able to put the clues together.”
He pondered my explanation for a minute before nodding. “Yes, I didn’t think you were my adversary. I think this woman hoodwinked you, too,” he said. “Maybe young detective and Aleksei can solve mystery together, eh?”
I mulled over the evidence in my head, trying to figure out how Jim or Randall might still fit into it. One clue had my mind racing more than the others, though. “Well, she does have the same family tattoo on her arm as Casey—Casey is the woman who owns the Bear Foot Lodge, where we were staying before we came up here—so I’m pretty sure they’re sisters and she’s mixed up in this too,” I shared. “Frank overheard someone arguing about us being in danger before we left, and I bet it was Casey on the radio with the perp. But why would she want to pose as Dr. Kroopnik anyway?”
“I do not know this barefoot place or why she pretend to you to be Dr. Max,” he said. “Is very troubling. How this woman found me, I do not know, but she stole my stash of precious Russian gems.”
“So the demantoids are yours,” I said. “There were a few in her rucksack. My brother Frank and I figured they came from your plane wreck; we just never guessed you were still alive to enjoy them!”
“Yes, she took others as well,” he said. “She raided my secret hiding place, and the ones in Max’s cabin are gone also.”
“Um, no offense, but why would a field biologist be stashing a mobster’s jewels?” my brain asked before my mouth had a chance to censor it. Aleksei didn’t seem to take offense, though.
“Max is a good friend. He helps me by taking them into the city to sell.”
“Dr. Kroopnik is helping you sell stolen jewels?” I blurted, again without thinking.
“I have stolen many things in my life, but not jewels. The demantoids are mine from Russia,” he explained without getting angry (though it was kind of hard to tell with that gruff accent of his). “Max is a good man. He sells the stones to donate money to charity in the name of the innocent victims of my old crimes. He helps me do a good thing to maybe make amends for some of the ugly things I did in my previous life of crime.”
As long as I was blurting out offensive questions, I figured I might as well go for broke. “Uh, like what kind of ugly things?”
He tugged on his beard ruefully.
“I did many financial scams and took much money that was not mine,” he admitted. “But I never caused anybody to be hurt by violence. Still, I know now that it is wrong, but I could not go to prison. I would miss the sunshine of my beautiful gardens too much. So I find a beautiful remote place to disappear. I even had my little toe cut off by a doctor friend to leave in crashed plane so they will find evidence I am dead and not look for me! Is very clever, no?”
“Now, that’s dedication, dude,” I said, marveling at how much of the campfire tale about the Mad Hermit of Black Bear Mountain was actually true. The investigators really had found a toe—it just hadn’t been gnawed on by a cannibal!
“I planned to wait for the police and prosecutor to forget about Aleksei, and then go home to my old life, but I like it so much on my mountain, I stay!” he declared. “All the wealth I need is right here in nature.”
Aleksei seemed to have the hang of the controls by now and had the little helicopter zipping along above the river.
“The rapids are fast, but we are faster,” he said. “Keep a lookout for the raft.”
Listening to Aleksei’s story had distracted me from thinking about Frank and Dr. Kroopnik getting sucked down the gnarliest stretch of rapids I’d ever seen. The rapids had tapered off for a while, which had given me hope that Frank might have been able to steer the raft ashore, but there’d been no sign of the red raft anywhere. And now the rapids were picking up again. And I mean picking up. From above, the river looked like a boiling cauldron filled with jagged rocks.
My heart sank when I saw the waterfall. It sank further when I saw the flash of red at the bottom.
“No!” I screamed, pressing my face to the glass, searching for signs of life near Frank’s torn and tattered raft.
18
HIGH DIVE
FRANK
BY THE TIME I SAW the waterfall, it was already too late to do anything about it. The current grabbed ahold of the raft and slung us over the edge before I could even scream.
It may not have been the most scientific experiment, but I think Dr. Kroopnik and I proved conclusively that rafts aren’t meant to fly. The rubber raft went one way and Dr. K and I each went another. Forty horrifying feet later, I splashed feetfirst into a vat of white water.
Luckily, the pool at the bottom of the falls was deep enough that I didn’t smash against the rocks, and the water spat me out again in one piece. My life vest kept me afloat as the current swept me farther downstream. As soon as I spotted a small break in the rapids, I swam as hard as I could for the bank and grabbed onto a fallen branch before the river could suck me back in.
I collapsed onto dry ground, coughing water and trying to catch my breath as I searched the river for Dr. Kroopnik. Shredded rubber was all that remained of the raft, but luckily, Dr. K was in better shape. He was doing the same thing as me, farther upstream on the opposite bank.
We waved to each other to signal we were okay, but that was about all the communicating we could achieve across a river full of thundering rapids. Looking around to get my bearings, I spotted the horse’s tracks along the bank. Not that it did me much good. “Don’t Call Me Maxine” was long gone, and it wasn’t like I could catch up on foot.
Stranded again! Or maybe not. I looked back upstream at the waterfall—the viewing angle was new, but the setting wasn’t. I’d seen the same waterfall in the distance while zipping across the river back to the lodge the day before!
Which meant I had a pretty good idea how to find the cliff ledge with the zip line launch back to the lodge. I signaled to Dr. K to keep heading downstream, gave him a thumbs-up to let him know I had a plan, and took off running through the woods, using my memory of the topography from the zip line to guide me.
It didn’t really hit me until I reached the zip line that I’d actually have to ride the dreadful thing again if I wanted to make it back to the lodge. It had been terrifying enough while safely strapped in with a helmet on and a professional there to make sure everything went smoothly. This time I’d be on my own, rocketing across the valley at fifty miles per hour without even a harness to stop me from falling.
Fear gripped my gut as I stood there looking at the vastness below. I had to step back from the ledge. I couldn’t go through with it.
But then an image of Joe dangling from the bridge flashed into my head . . . and our teacher, Jim, alone and hurt on Black Bear Mountain . . . and the rest of the Geccos, Melissa and Mandy and even Randall, still stranded at camp, fearing for their lives.
I grabbed hold of the handlebar and leaped off the c
liff before I had a chance to second-guess myself. I gripped the bar so tightly I thought the metal might bend, and I screamed like a madman as the river sped closer. The lodge came into view on the other side, and for a second I thought I might actually make it. But then something else came into view as well—the blond Max imposter racing her horse along the riverbank upstream from the lodge.
The horse heard me before “Max” saw me. The poor animal spooked at the sound of me hurtling toward it and reared up, catching its rider off guard and bucking her into the river along with her rucksack.
The water was a lot calmer there by the lodge, but from the way she was splashing around frantically, you’d have thought she’d been the one tossed off a waterfall. I was just about to zip right over her when I realized why—she couldn’t swim!
She was a fraud and a thief and she’d put all our lives in danger, but it was our job to catch criminals, not punish them. I couldn’t just watch another person drown.
I leaped from the zip line without thinking about it. Which, I quickly realized while plummeting toward the river for the second time in less than an hour, may not have been the smartest idea ever.
19
CATCH OF THE DAY
JOE
I DON’T SEE THEM!” I cried, hoping that meant Frank and the real Max had somehow survived the waterfall. “We have to go down there and look!”
“We can’t. There is nowhere to land the chopper,” Aleksei said. “We must search from the air. They may have washed . . .”
The big Russian stopped in midsentence, but I already knew what he’d been thinking—if they didn’t make it, we might find their bodies washed up downstream. I shoved the thought from my mind and kept searching the riverbank below.
I was so focused on the river, I almost didn’t notice the valley opening up on either side.
“This is closest to the outside world I have been in thirty years,” Aleksei reflected softly as the helicopter followed the river through the winding valley.
The Madman of Black Bear Mountain Page 7
